Kehinde Wiley - A Maze of Power

It was with the election of Barack Obama in 2008 that Kehinde Wiley began to consider the question of presidential leadership. In 2012, the American artist, whose work reinterprets representations of power and prestige in the history of portrait painting, imagined an original series dedicated to African heads of state. Over the next ten years, he traveled the continent to meet them. With each of them, he explores the history of aristocratic, royal and military portraiture in 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century Europe, to create a composition that illustrates each leader's singular view of what it means to be a contemporary African leader.